Kickbacks, Kayaks, & Kidnapping

Title: Kickbacks, Kayaks, & Kidnapping
Author: Tonya Kappes
Published: August 29, 2020 by Tonya Kappes Books
Format: Audiobook, 198 Pages
Genre: Amateur Sleuth
Series: Camper & Criminals #12

Blurb: Deep in the heart of the Daniel Boone National Forest, Mae West has spent the last few years bringing the rundown Happy Trails Campground and the small southern and cozy town of Normal, Kentucky back to a thriving economic community.

Mae's efforts haven't gone unnoticed. Not only is Happy Trails Campground in the running to be named Campground Hospitality of the Daniel Boone National Park, but she landed the coveted Paddle Fest kayak competition that secures the winner a spot on the Olympic team.

When champion and Olympian kayaker Bryce Anderson turns over in his kayak dead...there's more than paddling going on and his death has been ruled a homicide. News of Bryce's death spreads fast and Happy Trails becomes the center of bad publicity.

My Opinion: Whenever I return to Tonya Kappas’s A Camper & Criminals Cozy series, I remember why it’s my go-to comfort listen. It’s not just background noise, but more like spending time with old friends. Once you know the characters, you can play the audiobook while cleaning or doing other things, and it still feels like you’re in a familiar world.

That’s why I come back to this series when I can’t get into other books. It works like a reading palate cleanser. I pick a title, listen to Johanna Parker’s relaxed southern accent, and soon I feel grounded and ready to try other genres again.

Now, this installment didn’t hit me quite the same way as earlier books. By the end, I realized the story had been meandering along with the characters sort of… wandering. Then suddenly, poof, everything wrapped up quickly, almost like the author glanced at the clock and said, “Alright, let’s tie this up and move on.”

One thing I’ve noticed, and appreciate, is that you don’t need to start at book one. Kappas sprinkles just enough backstory into each installment that you can jump in wherever you like without feeling lost. Maybe later books will shift that, but for now, it’s refreshingly low commitment.

As for the format, I’m sticking with audio. Some readers have pointed out issues with the self published print versions, and honestly, Parker’s narration smooths over any bumps. She keeps the tone light and friendly, even if I do have to nudge the speed up to compensate for her slow-as-molasses Southern cadence.

In the end, Kickbacks, Kayaks, and Kidnapping may not be the strongest entry, but it still delivers that familiar, cozy vibe I rely on this series for.

Backtrack

Title: Backtrack
Author: Marc Cameron
Published: July 28, 2026 by Kensington
Format: Kindle, 464 Pages
Genre: Police Procedural
Series: Arliss Cutter #8

Blurb: 1977. D Wayne Cutter is a former U.S. Army Green Beret, part-time horseshoer, and a full-time Texas deputy sheriff with a second grandchild on the way when a quiet Sunday morning ends in murder and a manhunt. The theft of five million dollars in diamonds from an armored truck leaves two guards dead, one outlaw tracked down and taken out by Cutter, and another, Ricky Lee Pink—two-hundred-forty pounds of teenage rage—sentenced to life. The diamonds were never recovered. And Pinky never forgot that heist gone violently wrong.

2026. Following in the righteous footsteps of his late grandfather, Deputy U.S. Marshal Arliss Cutter gets word that Pinky has been granted release. Nursing a grudge for decades, Pinky vows to avenge the murder of his criminal mentor and find the whereabouts of the stolen gems that he believes is a buried Cutter family secret. Boarding an Alaskan cruise ship, and joined by two miscreant cellmates and his penpal girlfriend, Pinky aims for Anchorge—home to his ultimate target: everyone Arliss holds near and dear. Arliss must move fast because Pinky has the edge. And he has the mind to make the last living Cutter pay.

My Opinion: It took me a minute to catch the meaning behind the title, but once that little lightbulb flicked on, I had to give Marc Cameron credit for the clever play on words and setting the tone for the direction with this installment. The problem is that once you move past that initial spark, the book starts feeling… stretched. Not in a “slow burn tension” way, but in a “wait, why is this 100 pages longer than the others?” way, and can we get to the point already.

About halfway through, the seams start to show. It reads like Cameron had two separate story ideas with Grumpy’s backstory on one side and Arliss’s ex wife on the other, and neither quite had the weight of a full novel. So, he stitched them together, hoping they’d harmonize. They don’t. Instead, you get a book that feels like it’s constantly shifting lanes, and you’re left wondering which plot you’re supposed to be emotionally invested in.

None of this is bad writing. Cameron still knows how to build a scene, and he still knows these characters. But the pieces don’t meld, and the pacing suffers for it. The heart of the series is usually Lola’s sharp, dry snark, and that doesn’t even show up until the last quarter. It’s like waiting for your favorite character to enter the room, only to realize they were sidelined for most of the story.

By the end, I found myself wanting this to be over and for the series to return to what it does best: Arliss and Lola working in rhythm, solving problems with grit and humor, without all the unnecessary detours. I am sure, somewhere along the way, Grumpy had a rule about that.

The Calamity Club

Title: The Calamity Club
Author: Kathryn Stockett
Published: May 5, 2026 by Spiegel & Grau
Format: Hardcover, Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high.

Eleven-year-old Meg, one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford on a mission to ask her social-climbing sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. And Charlie is a woman with a past, running low on luck but driven by fire, fury, and grit. When their fates converge, they come up with an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. Together, they form an unlikely sisterhood—but in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, women’s freedom is fragile, and making an enemy can have dire consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

The Calamity Club will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to resilience, friendship, and the fierce, funny women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

My Opinion: I’ll admit it: I almost walked away from The Calamity Club. The opening chapters felt dull to me, somehow muted, and not one character reached out and grabbed my attention. I kept thinking, Well, this is a shame, because I wanted to love it like everyone else. But I gave it one more chance and switched to the audiobook, and that’s when everything changed. Narrators Jenna Lamia and January LaVoy didn’t just read the story; they lifted and empassioned it. Their performances cracked the book wide open, and suddenly I found myself leaning in, invested, and unexpectedly moved.

Kathryn Stockett packs this novel with everything: heartbreak, humor, honesty, resilience, and those tiny human truths that sneak up on you when you’re not looking. Each chapter adds another layer, another emotional turn, another moment where you think, Oh, these women [yes, I am considering an eleven-year-old a woman]… what will they get up to next? And when the middle starts to feel a little long, like maybe the story is taking a breather, Stockett tosses in a new twist, a fresh head tilt, and suddenly I was right back in it, fully attentive and smiling at the audacity in these pages.

This novel ended up being one of the longest books I’ve read this year, and still, I didn’t want it to end. I found myself lingering, hoping, imagining futures for each of these women. I choose to believe they all found their happily-ever-after because after everything they endured, I couldn’t bear to picture it any other way.

Boundary Waters

Title: Boundary Waters
Author: William Kent Krueger
Published: June 9, 2009 by Atria Books
Format: Paperback, 352 Pages
Genre: Mystery
Series: Cork O'Connor #2

Blurb: Former small-town sheriff Cork O’Connor leads a desperate search-and-rescue mission into the unforgiving Minnesota wilderness in this “gritty, bloody adventure” ( Publishers Weekly ) from critically acclaimed author William Kent Krueger’s award-winning mystery series.

The Quetico-Superior Wilderness: more than two million acres of forest, white-water rapids, and uncharted islands on the Canadian/American border. Somewhere in the heart of this unforgiving territory, a young woman named Shiloh—a country-western singer at the height of her fame—has disappeared.

Her father arrives in Aurora, Minnesota, to hire Cork O’Connor to find his daughter. Cork joins a search party that includes an ex-con, two FBI agents, and a ten-year-old boy. Others are on Shiloh’s trail as well—men hired not just to find her, but to kill her.

As the expedition ventures deeper into the wilderness, strangers descend on Aurora, threatening to spill blood on the town’s snowy streets. Meanwhile, out on the Boundary Waters, winter falls hard. Cork’s team of searchers loses contact with civilization, and like the brutal winds of a Minnesota blizzard, death—violent and sudden—stalks them.

My Opinion: You know that feeling when you finally pull a long ignored book off your TBR shelf and think, Alright, today’s the day? That was my mindset going into this second Cork O’Connor novel. I read the first book so long ago that I forgot about Cork and felt it was time to check in with him again.

The experience ended up being kind of drab, more like a Sunday drive rather than the roller coaster I’d hoped for.

The opening is slow, to the point you begin to wonder if you made a wrong choice; then, eventually, the pieces begin to click into place, and suddenly you’re right there with Cork and Shiloh, moving through the wilderness and the tension and the secrets. For a while, it feels like the book is gearing up for something big. But instead of keeping the momentum, it settles back into that steady simmer. Not bad, just not the pace I was craving.

And because the book was published in 2009, it does show its age a bit. Not in a way that makes it unreadable, but you can feel the era in the dialogue, the pacing, and the way certain plot elements are handled.

One thing that stood out was the Native American storytelling woven throughout the narrative. Those moments felt alive and far more compelling, to the point that I found myself wishing the book leaned even harder into cultural richness.

By the end, the storyline had stretched itself thin. A few threads dangled without answers, and I wasn’t quite invested enough to chase them into future installments. Maybe they’re resolved later in the series, maybe not, but I’m not going along for the ride.

Still, I accomplished my goal: I read a book that had been sitting around for far too long. Sometimes that’s enough. Not every read has to be a revelation; some are simply a quiet checkmark on the list, a reminder that clearing the shelf can feel just as satisfying as discovering a new favorite.

If nothing else, Boundary Waters gave me a quiet few days, a bit of wilderness atmosphere, and a nudge to keep tackling those long waiting books. And for now, that’s good enough.